Trump: The Ultimate Troll's Troll

A MASTER of creating and exploiting a Reflexive Environment...

A reflexive environment is one where everybody has to talk about a certain thing. That thing is going to be very polarizing, and there are either going to be one, or two, right ways to talk about it. Usually they're going to be diametrically opposed to one another, and that means it's a dialectical weapon.

 
When George Soros famously shorted the the pound sterling in like '92 or whatever, which led to him writing "The Alchemy of Finance" where he said that "Alchemy is not interested in truth like the scientific method, it's interested in operational success." The method he said that they used to do the Alchemy of Finance was reflexivity. The idea is that you start jinning up an idea and make the idea become true because everybody starts talking about it and believing it in a particular way. So "the current thing" takes place in a reflexive environment (often Social Media).

On praising your negotiation "adversaries" (like Kim Jong Il) once an offer has been made: 

h/t - Woodsterman

Maryland Struggles to Fund It's Bloated State Gov Bureaucracy...

...and will pay outside consultants 20% of all Budget Savings Identified because the State employees are too incompetent to form their own DOGE like team?  I wonder how the Dem politicians in DC would react if Elon were entitled by a Trump-let contract to 20% of all federal budget savings he identified.... 20% of $2 trillion capped at $300b?

Jack Bowman, "Gov. Moore launches Maryland 'modernization' plan, aims for $50 million in savings"

Gov. Wes Moore is directing his administration to scour the state’s spending for waste and inefficiency, with a goal of producing $50 million in savings.

Moore announced the effort, called the Government Modernization Initiative, two days after promising to propose a budget with $2 billion in cuts, an attempt to address a projected $3 billion deficit.

“It’s finding the breakage in the systems and fixing them so we’re not papering it over in more expensive ways later on,” Moore said of the initiative in a Friday announcement.

The initiative is aimed at finding inconsistent or unnecessary spending throughout state government, fixing “things that have long been broken.”

Moore went on to mention inefficiencies including under-utilized state vehicles and inconsistently-priced technology and equipment that, if addressed, could save the state $50 million “this year alone.”

Chief Performance Officer Asma Mirza and the performance cabinet will spearhead the effort. Elisabeth Sachs, a longtime nonprofit and state/local government leader, will also contribute to the project.

Boston Consulting Group will also be brought on to aid in the analysis. In a pay-for-performance contract approved in October, the state will pay the firm, one of the “big three” in strategy consulting, a 20% share of the savings achieved, with a maximum payout of $15 million.

The study will begin this year, with a goal of implementing changes by fiscal year 2026, which begins in July.

“We know the challenges that exist,” Moore said. “It’s created a chance for this team to show what we’re made of, because we will address it, and Maryland will grow.”

Really?  $15 million on outside consultants? No wonder they're $3b in the hole... @@

Civilization and Its' Discontents...

...I gotta assuage me some white guilt-pride!

What responsibilities do individuals have in supporting and maintaining their civilization?  What sacrifices should we be expected to make for it?

Meden agan!

Perkins Coie

Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.[1]

In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures (ie - 702 NSA dB search), and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.[2] This practice gained support after the Supreme Court's 2009 Herring v. United States decision.[2]